Armand-Albert Rateau bronze table from the 1920s with legs shaped like birds.

Photo: Courtesy of Biennale des Antiquares and the Gallerie Vallois

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Exterior of the Grand Palais.

Joe Schildhorn /BFAnyc.com

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Imagine the Grand Souk of Istanbul piled high with Old Master paintings, eighteenth-century French furniture, blue-chip postwar art, rare manuscripts, and diamonds as big as the Ritz, and you’ll have a sense of what makes the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris both disorienting for the average flea-market-goer and a source of great national pride. Open through September 23 at the Grand Palais, this year’s edition emphasizes French savoir faire and connoisseurship, with the bulk of the 150 exhibitors hailing from within the hexagon.

My week in Paris and environs began spectacularly on Monday evening, with a concert and surreally elegant feast sponsored by Dom Pérignon at the Château de Versailles, where pianist Lang Lang, composer Alexandre Desplat, and avant-garde éminence grise Robert Wilson collaborated on a presentation of music and dance inspired by three different champagne vintages. (Though deliciously light and bubbly, it was Lang Lang’s encore—a Chopin waltz—that brought Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, and LVMH top brass to their feet.)

My head was still spinning at the Biennale gala on Wednesday evening, as guests, including Salma Hayek and her husband, François-Henri Pinault, former First Lady Bernadette Chirac and one of her cochairs, Christian Deydier, and master of ceremonies Karl Lagerfeld, marched in through rows of red-plumed Republican Guards. Lagerfeld’s mise-en-scène paid tribute to the passages of Paris, the covered arcades that sprang up in the nineteenth century, sheltering shoppers from inclement weather. (The passages also provided fertile ground for art: Émile Zola set a novel inside one; the Surrealists adored them; Walter Benjamin considered them incubators of modernity.)

The French Socialists may be back in power, but inside it was strictly ancien régime, celebrities, and new money. I spied Chinese millionaires mulling over baubles in an alcove at Dior, where I tried on one of designer Victoire de Castellane’s wonderfully exuberant cocktail rings, a giant aquamarine whose elaborate setting included tiny birds encrusted with diamonds and colored jewels, and a pearl-filled nest.

Grouped around a central plaza, beneath an enormous replica of a hot-air balloon (Lagerfeld’s homage to French invention) were heavy hitters, such as Kraemer, the oldest family-owned company in Paris, purveyors of eighteenth-century writing desks with secret compartments and the like, to both Michael Jackson and Versailles, and where one could admire the artistry of Riesener, Marie Antoinette’s favorite cabinet maker. Across the way, at L&M Fine Arts, Andy Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylor (rumored to be the fair’s most expensive work) reigned in effigy. (A 60.5-carat emerald-and-diamond necklace from the Christie’s auction of her estate last December, a gift from Richard Burton, was on display nearby at Bulgari.)

Had I five million or so dollars to spare, I would happily have gone home with something more modest, such as an exquisite, mid-size Yves Klein painting (also at L&M) covered in gold leaf. Other bagatelles that I longed for: a to-do list penned by the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (Librairie Thomas-Scheler); an exquisitely hand-colored, seventeenth-century fencing manual (Rodolphe Chamonal); or a low bronze table from the 1920s with legs shaped like birds, by Armand-Albert Rateau, who also decorated designer Jeanne Lanvin’s boudoir (Galerie Vallois).

Instead, across the Seine, at the antiquarian Kugel, I had to content myself with the exquisite manners of the Marquis de Breteuil, who was present at Kugel’s exhibition of an extraordinary, gem-studded table created by the Saxon goldsmith Johann Christian Neuber and given as a gift by Friedrich Augustus III to the Marquis’ ancestor, the diplomat Louis-Auguste de Breteuil, for having brokered a peace treaty between Prussia and Austria in 1779. (The Marquis keeps the priceless table, which was recently shown at the Frick Collection in New York, at his family chateau; he’d like to find a new home for it, though he says both the Louvre and Versailles have refused it.) He admired a small ring that I wear—tiny amethysts encircling the braided hair of a woman who passed away in the eighteenth century—assuming (mistakenly) that it had been passed down to me through generations. But he approved of its presence on my finger anyway.

The Bienniale des Antiquaires continues at the Grand Palais in Paris through September 23; sna-france.com